Random Bits from Boredom

The general guidance for vintage Japanese lens repair is to use JIS drivers to avoid stripping the screw heads so what and how many do we ne...

The Micro Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 series of lens has had a long history with the first iteration arriving in 1961 and lasted nearly 20 years with...

I've loved this lens for a while now for its a ability to resist flare like no other vintage Nikkor I've used, but I've put off...

Rick Housh's archived Geocities Lens hood page was the bible for helping us finding the right lens hood for our vintage Nikkors - whils...

The 35mm focal length was a classic "candid" lens, for street photography/photojournalism etc but for me it was always a compromis...

The 50mm f/1.4 AI and its optical formula was inheritted by its successor and beyond which meant it was in production from the late 70s to ...

Having serviced and owned a number of Nikkor 50mm I asked myself how many 50mm do we actually need ? It turns out that just one more in the...

Helicoid grease is a specialist item that is difficult to source and suitable options are limited. Even with options, the lens manufacturer...

As an amatuer photographer interested in lighting I was almost always drawn to a beauty dish, and I remember quite a lot of interest for Tod...

The Godox brand has been pumping out budget lights for a while now and in recent years the options for entry level monoblock has fallen away...

My Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AI-S was a favourite for many years and was one of my first manual focus lenses and the dampened, but not stiff, focus...

The Nikkor 80-200mm f/4.5 AI was a compact professional grade zoom produced from ~1977-1981 - it was regarded highly at the time with some p...

Hand held light meters relevance may been less common with photographers but they arguably still have a niche, particular in studio/flash ap...

The Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/4 AI was released along side the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI in 1977 and offered a more comfortable working distanc...

The Micro Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI is an ~40 year old lens and my copy has various "dry or uneven" areas over its focus range after a...

Maintaining older Nikkor lenses has become easier with resources such as Richard Haw's website and also Kenneth Olsen's YouTube cha...

The final 50mm f/1.8 AI-S manual focus lens, with its 0.6m minimum focus distance and missing rabbit ear/coupling prong, was a lens that was...

The 50mm was the "standard" kit lens in the 1970s and there were a number of iterations across the AI and AI-S variations from the...

The Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED AI-S released in 1981 seems to have acquired lengendary status over years but this lens but this prime focal lengt...

The Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 AI was released ~1979, and whilst it seemed to have been shadowed somewhat by its 105mm f/2.5 AI-S sibling, still had...